Time to wrap things up! Homemade Gyoza Wrappers

“Luck is like having a rice dumpling fly into your mouth.” — Japanese Proverb

I’m a huge lover of all types of dumplings, especially Japanese gyoza.Living in Japan meant I was able to feed my inner gyoza monster on a regular basis. In our apartment complex in Tokyo we had a little mini supermarket in the courtyard. Squirrel and I would make daily pilgrimages there for things like milk, fresh veggies, or a piece of fish for dinner. Every week a stand was set up in the middle of the store where a vendor sold something special, like a variety of miso pickles or tea. Once a month my favorite vendor would set up shop to sell amazing gyoza. He made all of his own gyoza wrappers and sold them two ways–hot and ready to eat, or ready to be popped into a hot pan and cooked. Squirrel and I would grab a package of 10 and go home and have ourselves a little gyoza feast.

Now that we’re in the States, far away from my gyoza man, my options are much more limited. Although I can buy them frozen or at a restaurant, they’re not quite the same. Those homemade wrappers make such a huge difference. The good news is, if you’ve got a bit of time to spare, you too can have gyoza made with homemade wrappers at home. Just like homemade pasta, the texture of homemade gyoza wrappers is a lot different. Storebought wrappers are almost papery in comparison. Homemade are a bit doughier. With homemade you can make them as thick or as thin as you like depending on your personal preferences. Although it is easier to grab a pack of premade wrappers when making your own gyoza, I highly recommend taking the time to make your own sometime. They are actually very easy to make and worth the effort!

Homemade Gyoza WrappersAdapted from The Japanese Kitchen, by Hiroko Shimbo
Makes 40 wrappersSift two cups of all-purpose flour into a large bowl and stir in a 1/4 teaspoon of salt.Add about 1/2 a cup of boiling water, little by little, using chopsticks to stir, until you can form the mixture into a ball. Depending on the weather, you may need to add a little bit more water to reach this consistency.Let the dough sit in the bowl, covered with a damp cloth, for 1 hour.On a floured work surface, knead the dough for about five minutes, or until it is smooth.Shape the dough into a long log, and cut the log crosswise into 40 slices. The trick here is to get the log as cylindrical as possible, as this will help in shaping your wrappers into nice circles later on.To maintain similar size in your pieces, cut the log into 4 equal pieces, and then cut each of those pieces in half, and so on. Dust each cut side with additional flour (this help prevent the surfaces from drying out).Also, make sure you are using a very sharp knife to cut your log, as this will help you maintain the circular shape of your slices (otherwise they kind of mash down and turn into ovals, which is okay, but will be harder to roll out into circular wrappers).Roll each piece of dough into a 3-inch disk, making the outer edge thinner than the center, then dust it liberally with additional flour, and stack them (the flour will help keep them fresh and prevent them from sticking to each other).Initially your wrappers might be very funny shapes, but they’ll still taste good! The more you make, the better you’ll get at making circles. The more circular your slices are (from cutting your dough log), the more successful you will be when rolling them out.Shhhh, don’t tell!–If you want an easy way to cheat and get perfectly circular wrappers, grab a circular cookie cutter that is 3- to 3.5-inches in diameter, roll out your dough to a slightly larger size, and use the cutter to cut out a perfect circle.Wrap the stack tightly in plastic wrap until ready for use.After use, if you have remaining wrappers, rewrap them in plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator.

*For a great brief overview of the dumplings of the world, see The Gourmet Girl’s Article, Dumplings…Who knew?

Oh sure, now I have to make them from scratch….but they would be so much more yummy. And it is a lot more special to teach my daughter how to make them rather than teach her how to take the bag out of the freezer and cook them. Thanks for the motivation. Can't wait for the next installment. =)

Love the tutorial. I love dumplinsg but never made the skin myself. I probably will use a round cutter with them too. :). That's what I miss living in a big city is having great food/groceries some mere steps away.

oooh can't wait to see the savory filling ideas, I've never made my own dumplings before. My granma who is Russian would make piroshki or piroggi with a cream cheese and sultana filing then cook them and pop them in a large bowl with lashing of butter. They were soooo good. I really need to get her to show me how to make them.

Impressive! You might have an "inner gyoza monster" but I have an inner "hungry hungry hippo." I typically use wonton wrappers for lots of things because they are so versatile, but your description of home-made gyoza wrappers makes me think I just might be able to try making some of these by myself.

; ; I know how you feel! It used to be so easy. If I wanted to get gyoza, I can easily go to my favorite ramen shop and order some for 300 yen or so. Now that I’m in the States I’ve got to make everything myself. Ironically, I end up spending more money because some ingredients are difficult to get. (They charge an arm and a leg for gobo here…and you can’t have kinpira gobo without the gobo!) Thanks for the tutorial. It was helpful.

Ohayo Gozaimasu(good morning) Nihon no tabemono wa hontoni oishi desu and a very health foods the most i like in japanese foods was the processing and so perfect! I cooked for my husband searching your website. Actually we went for the japanese cuisine almost 1 hr.driving away from ourhouse.But the foods was so good (oishi kattta!) I love most miso ramen noodle and gyoza(dumpling) I felt, I was in japan eaten jap.foods. Keep it up!

my wife, who is japanese, planned to make gyoza yesterday. she had gyoza wrappers in the freezer and we had just picked up some ground pork. we have a local source for organic pork and the ground pork is out of this world, sweet and juicy. she went off to the japanese market to pick up some garlic chives but when she got back and pulled the wrappers out of the freezer, they had gone bad. when i told her i would make the wrappers, she laughed. even her mother had never made gyoza wrappers. i had a chinese roommate in college and remember gathering around a table and making gyoza from scratch, even the wrappers i knew it could be done. one guy rolled out kneaded dough and rolled out wrappers at lightening speed!

i followed your recipe to the tee except that i kneaded the dough before and after letting it rest for an hour. i kneaded it until smooth prior to letting it rest as i had seen this on a video somewhere else. not sure of the science behind this so i don’t know if it was the right thing to do. making the dough was easy. it is the rolling it our part that is makes the difference. it took me about an hour to roll out 40 wrappers. i imagine if i had the skills of those chinese ladies on youtube, it would have gone much faster!

the end product were perfectly cut wrappers. i used a measuring cup to cut them perfectly and kneaded the trimmings making some additional skins.

note: if you are in california…this farm producers great organic pork which they bring to bay area farmer’s markets: http://www.oldcreekranch.net/

I read about these at Steamy Kitchen, but it took me until now to actually give it a try. Thinking about making home made wrappers AND dumplings was a bit intimidating. I am glad that I tried. Not nearly as hard as I thought, but extra helpers were nice. The wrappers came out just the right thickness and the filling was delicious. Thanks, I’ll be making these again.

Hello, and thank you for your wonderful instructions! I found “general instructions” elsewhere (using wheat, which I would prefer), but there were no details as per amounts. So I followed your recipe with the unbleached flour and it went great!

Actually, the first batch some dough got wasted because I did not understand not all of the flour is perfectly mixed into the water…and we discovered our (unused-for-years) rolling pin had gone MISSING…but after that I had the hang of it! I only wish I could find cookie cutters large enough, because rolling them takes quite some time! But the largest round cutter I found at the store was only 2.5 inches, which is too small.

Anyway, I thought making wrappers would be so much more difficult. Really, it’s not! But friends, if you can find 3-inch or 3.5-inch round cookie/biscuit cutters, do that!

Like someone else said, unless you live in a MAJOR city, finding Japanese ingredients is difficult…even at “Asian” markets. Half the stuff you do find is too expensive! So it’s great to be able to work from scratch like this! Thanks again!

Hi, I tried these out because I’d gathered all the ingredients for a gyoza recipe but managed to forget to buy wrappers (duh.).

They worked and tasted great, thankyou! Just a couple of notes:
-I’m Australian, and used what we call ‘plain flour’, which I think is called baking flour in the states. Worked just fine
-I needed closer to 3/4 cup boiling water to get all the flour to cooporate
-When rolling the disks, I found it easiest to dip each side in flour, tap off the excess, roll, then dip and tap again. The first time makes the dough far more compliant without working an excess of flour into the dough, the second was, as you instructed, to allow neater stacking.
-The salt is entirely necessary, I omitted it because the sauce I was making was salty, but the dough does need that little bit of salt to help cut through the oil. I started very lightly sprinkling the constructed gyoza when I was half-way through the batch, and it made a vast improvement.

I make this gyoza few days ago. It tasted delicious. I couldn’t find ready made gyoza skin locally, hence I prepared it from scratch. The skin turns out fine and not too doughy. The trick of getting paper thin skin is using the dimsum wooden rolling pin which allows me to apply equal pressure on the dough to get the paper thin edge. This gyoza go well with Japanese Gyoza dipping sauce.

This is such a wonderful recipe! If using a biscuit cutter is cheating then I REALLY cheated. I used my pasta machine to roll out the sheets of dough then used a biscuit cutter. It worked great. They looked like store bought but with no bad stuff in them! Thank you so much for the recipe.

Just tried making some of the wraps from the recipe. I didn’t get quite as many wrappers as listed here, but then I didn’t have a good roller or cutter to make them nice and thin (or in shape). It was really nice and easy to make though.

I had some problem with the flour forming clumps around salt crystals for some reason. They just look like the back of a pretzels at the end, but I just kneaded it down again. The grains were still there, but it still made great wrappers. Maybe I should’ve used hotter water or something.

Rachael, thank you so much for this post! My little guy loves gyoza, and of course before this week, making gyoza wrappers from scratch never occurred to me. As luck would have it, we ran out of wrappers and I get to discover your post!

We’ve made gyoza wrappers TWICE this week. What a great activity for mommy and little boy.

We do Japanese food for Christmas Eve and I’m making the wrappers from your recipe. I have made them a few times before but never remember the recipe. A trick I do, though, is I roll the dough with a pasta roller into a long strip, then cut out the rounds with a cookie cutter. Makes them perfect and quick! Happy holidays!

In my family we would make gyoza for all the special occasion meals throughout my childhood (my brother and I were drafted in to help wrapping from the age of about 8). But making the wrappers was always my dad’s job ‘cos it was such hard work rolling out the dough. Until we discovered that you could use a pasta machine to roll the dough. Just take a large chunk of dough (enough for about 5 wrappers) and put it through the pasta machine on thinner and thinner settings until you get it to the right thickness (2 on our pasta machine). You will have a long thin strip of dough that you can lay out on the counter and use a large glass (or cookie cutter) to cut out your wrappers. repeat until all your dough is used up.

Do you also have the recipe for store bought wrapper skins?
We like the way that you almost do not taste or have to chew
on these skins and after you put the gyoza in your mouth will
immediately taste the filling of the gyoza. But we cannot a recipe
for this kind of dough anywhere on the internet.

I am going to one of those “Food Revolution” potluck dinners tonight and I wanted to make my delicious dumplings! Last time I just bought won ton skins because I made them last minute with some friends, but this time I was confident I’d find some at a Japanese grocery store a few towns over…I didn’t. Thanks for saving my dumplings!!! (my dough is resting right now as we speak…or I guess as I type)
Can’t wait to see how they turn out!!!! XD

The Dumplings went over very well in the end, but my dough was so stiff and difficult to roll out, even when I added more water. I enlisted my best friend who makes pasta a lot and she did a better job of rolling them out. it was hard to get them thin enough so I would cut the dough into smaller sections and focus on rolling those out then, then biscuit cutter, then ANOTHER quick roll out and then I’d adjust the shape back to a mare circular look by very gently stretching with my hands. The whole process was very time consuming, but my friends certainly took notice and appreciated the hard work that went into the entirely homemade dumplings :)